Bookmarker tag: topic/addiction (10 notes)

I don’t regret my alcoholism anymore. Before I left California my youngest son, Joel, came to breakfast. The same son I used to steal from, who had told me I wasn’t his mother. I cooked cheese blintzes; we drank coffee and read the paper, muttering to each other about Rickey Henderson, George Bush. Then he went to work. He kissed me and said So long, Ma. So long, I said.

All over the world mothers are having breakfast with their sons, seeing them off at the door. Can they know the gratitude I felt, standing there, waving? The reprieve.

“True,” Mrs. Bevins said. “People are always saying ‘tell the truth’ when you write. Actually it is hard to lie. The assignment seems silly … a stump. But this is deeply felt. I see an alcoholic who is sick and tired. This stump is how I would have described myself before I stopped drinking.”

“How long were you sober before you felt different?” I asked her. She said it worked the other way around. First I had to think I wasn’t hopeless, then I could stop.

“Whoa,” Daron said, “if I want to hear this shit I’ll sign up for AA meetings.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Do me a favor, though. Don’t answer this out loud. Each of you. Ask yourself if the last time, or times, you were arrested, whatever it was for—were you high on drugs or alcohol at the time?” Silence. Busted. We all laughed. Dwight said, “You know that group MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers? We got our own group, DAM. Drunks Against Mothers.”

“You girls. Still look gorgeous,” he gasps.

He’s lying. I’m forty-three and so is Rhea, married with three children in Seattle. I can’t get over that: three. I’m back at my mother’s again, trying to finish my B.A. at UCLA Extension after some long, confusing detours. “Your desultory twenties,” my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer. I’m praying it’s over. Some mornings, the sun looks wrong outside my window. I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: It’s finished. Everything went past, without me. Those days I know not to close my eyes for too long, or the fun will really start.

JE: I’ve had similar major shifts in my worldview, which I attribute to multiple causes, but mostly to sobriety and doing the things that it takes to be sober (“outside my comfort zone” things). I’m grateful for that. While I still slip into negative thinking, mostly I am able to find joy and wonder in small things, like a positive interaction with one of my students or even the seasons changing. Sometimes I think how funny it is that my life is so wholesome now, and how much better it is to seek a wholesome life, rather than the life of chaos that I avoided personal responsibility for because I thought of myself as having an “artistic temperament” or whatever. (Which I guess is still true, given my emotional volatility, but at least now I attempt to regulate it.) Sometimes I think I’m ridiculous because I’ve gotten into sober clichés like meditation and exercise. I think it’s cute/funny that you’ve turned to weightlifting and Jesus for similar reasons. How do you feel about being a sober cliché?

You asked me once, toward the end, after you’d discovered the withdrawals – the ones from our bank account, and the ones I was going through in that hotel room during one of my ‘business trips’ – why I did drugs. I told you that growing up in a loud and alcoholic household, I liked to enter the storage cubbyhole under our kitchen floor, where it was earthy and cool and dark and still, and pretend that everything outside had vanished, though I could hear the distant yelling, and that as an adult narcotics held a tremendous instinctive appeal, in the way it offered a quiet place to hide, though it was better than that cubby since you could take the still place with you wherever you went. But this was false. Oh, it may have been true years ago, but the need had long since become its own truth, the only truth that mattered.

Because the other truth, I guess, is that I don’t see the point of all this, however you define this. From the outside, the drugs may seem to take away meaning, to confer a dead pointlessness to the proceedings; from the inside, however, it is just the opposite. They provide a titanium-grade purpose to my days, one that is knowable and achievable. Far from meaningless, dope is the greatest possible meaning, an absolutely defined value and good in a world of rumors and wraiths, fleeting desires and disappointments flickering incandescent against the void. It is nothing, but it is something. It is the somethingest nothing there is.

Right now I want to say something about myself and Colonel Tom. One morning toward the very end of my career in Homicide I came in for the eight to four—late, drunk, with a face made of orange sand, and carrying my liver on my hip like a flight bag. Colonel Tom got me into his office and said, Mike, you can kill yourself if that’s what you want. But don’t expect me to watch you doing it. He took me by the arm and led me to the second tier of the headquarters garage. He drove me straight to Lex General. The admissions doc looked me over and the first thing he said was, You live alone, right? And I said, No. No, I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss…After they dried me out I convalesced at the Rockwells’ residence—this was when they lived way out in Whitefield. For a week I lay in a little bedroom at the back of the ground floor. The distant traffic was music and people who weren’t people—as well as people who were—came and stood at the foot of my bed. Uncle Tom, Miriam, the family physician. And then the others. And Jennifer Rockwell, who was nineteen years old, would come and read to me in the evenings. I lay there trying to listen to her clear young voice, wondering if Jennifer was real or just another of the ghosts who occasionally stopped by, cool, self-sufficient, unreproachful figures, their faces carved and blue.

I never felt judged by her. She had her troubles too, back then. And she was the daughter of a police. She didn’t judge.

The drinking too much was quiet in its way and yet, without causing physical disturbance, was violent enough. I would start around midday, innocuously, with a glass of wine and graduate pre-dinner to scotch or bourbon. It was a problem I didn’t know I had until I was nearing the bottom of a bottle and so to avoid that feeling I would buy several bottles at once. The new complexion-challenged boy at the corner liquor store asked if I was having a party. I got into my car and started crying. But I didn’t stop drinking. Instead I spread my purchases over a wider area, knowing the while how pathetic I was.

Getting high, which is hard to accomplish through the methadone (it takes a lot, Roxy has to be careful), gives her a sensation of power and transcendent rightness beyond anything she could have imagined when she uttered those words: make my mark. Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect. No one can say she hasn’t been steady— or, rather, everyone says that, but only because they fail to grasp that her scarred arms and swollen fingers, her gray teeth and thin hair and stooped, halting gait, are testaments to her fierce devotion. She’s outlasted even Jocelyn, whom she used to nod off with at her father’s house. Jocelyn got a social work degree in her forties and settled down with a famous guitarist who’d been in love with her since high school. Not Roxy. She will depart this world empty-handed: a sacrifice that only Kiki, in the religious fervor of her girlhood, might have understood.

Our baby, Corey, was red and very small, about the size of a hand. He looked scalded. You could see he shouldn’t be out in the world. Can’t we put him back? I asked that question several times. Isn’t there a way to put him back? No one even answered me.

He had a tight little face, a shrunken face like a mummy dug up after centuries. The pain of thousands of years was in it.

I would sit there, watching him through the glass. He moved like a boiled hand, opening and closing weakly. “We need to turn him,” the nurses would tell me, and I’d move away.

I only took a bump when I couldn’t move or care for the other two without it. I’d think, Just a little one, just enough to get them to school, and I’d take the bump and feel the baby clench up in me.

After Corey died, I was in a psychiatric hospital for months. I just want to die, I’d say, and they’d tell me, You have two girls who need you. And you’re clean, you’ve kicked your habit and your whole life is still ahead of you.

I told my mother, “The doctors say I have to forgive myself or I can’t go on. So I’m trying to do that.” And my mother said, “Forgiving yourself is one thing. Getting God to forgive you is something else.”

My first mistake was being in a hurry. I grabbed for what was in front of me: marrying Seth the rock star, having a child—I’d always been special and I thought the specialness would still be there no matter what, but this other stuff might not.

And by the time I saw how really bad things were—Seth fighting with his band, disappearing for days while I scrambled to take care of two kids—by the time I realized what a pit I’d fallen into, it was too late. I had two little girls, a husband who was smoking meth, and one year of community college. I still lived twenty minutes from where I grew up.

I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and raging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked in the door. I wanted to be on the same side again. So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute or every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more: the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper and bang on the door. Then looking out the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky. And I was back on top. We were going to make it, Seth and I. The voice in my head was back again, telling me stories, too many to write down or even tell one from another.